


In the Dark of the Night

by ooinugirloo



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 3B Coda, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, POV Stiles, Possession, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 21:21:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1484452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ooinugirloo/pseuds/ooinugirloo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is the cold in the pit of your stomach, and the trembling of your hands. You can feel it there, shredding you from the inside, taking over when you sleep. This isn't you, you tell yourself. You know yourself--snap out of it, Stiles--and this is all just a bad dream, you'll be you when you wake up again. The trouble is, you can't tell when you're asleep anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Dark of the Night

You feel like you’re a passenger in your body—peeking over your own shoulder to check on what your hands are doing. You can’t feel them. You can’t feel much of anything past the suffocating weight of your own powerlessness. The cold is the only thing you can feel anymore; you can feel your heart freezing over one blood vessel at a time—you can feel it creeping through your veins, an inexorable paralytic. You clench your fists—inasmuch as you can; you think you see its fingers twitch—and curl yourself around the slowly dying embers of warmth that you’ve hidden at the very bottom of your heart, hoping against hope that you can keep them alive for just another day/hour/minute/second. You close your eyes against the oppressive black _void_ that your mind has become and try to recall the most vibrant memories you have, swallowing down your nausea at the thought that they too could desaturate and blacken, like the autumn harvest rotting and shriveling at winter’s touch. You bite your lip, a drop of your blood rolling down your chin and dripping down, down, the only color in the void.

 

_It licks its lips covetously, smiling a humorless smile—a rictus grin—simply stretching lips over bared teeth like a lazy snarl. Its eyes are sharp but dead as they lock with the beating-heart-dripping-blood red eyes of its prey. It thought it would be harder, really. All of these pups so concerned about saving lives they’ve neglected their own. Trailing its long fingers carelessly over the hilt of the sword impaling the boy in front of it, it has a thought. “He’s screaming, you know,” It chuckles, leaning in close, “tearing himself to pieces trying to stop me.” It revels in the furrowing of his brows, the anguish in those glowing, living, eyes. It leans in close, inhaling, feeling the pain and chaos roll down its throat and quiet the screaming in the pit of its stomach for bare seconds before it needs more. It draws its blunt human nails down the cheek of the boy idly, staying a hairsbreadth away from drawing blood, raising angry red welts instead. It’s never played with wolves before—the amount of damage, physical and emotional that they can sustain before breaking is astounding. They’re infuriatingly moral, though, like puppies content to snap and growl but unwilling to draw blood. With one exception—its current skin has something of the fox about him; he does his level best to rip its throat out when it draw near, knowing that it deserves no gentleness or mercy. It is delightful. ‘Good,’ it whispers, ‘show me no mercy—for I will show none to you.’_

 

You come awake all at once, choking on the thick, oily tang of terror on your tongue. Lurching to your feet, you almost overbalance—unused to controlling your body, too accustomed to having to fight for the barest responses that you flail uncoordinatedly here, under your own power. You feel drugged, you don’t know if Deaton managed to dose you again or if this is just a side effect of having a malevolent spirit drag its claws through your brain. It’s out of the driver’s seat for the time being, though, for a minute or an hour or a day you don’t know, but you know that you have to make use of the time you have. You fumble your way to your computer, and start researching, looking for anything that could be of use. You start with the Wikipedia page for _kitsune_ and click through any vaguely useful looking links until somehow, two hours later, you’re staring down at the entry _Thousand Origami Cranes_ , eyes catching on ‘anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane, such as long life or recovery from illness or injury’, the irony startling a rusty laugh out of your throat. The odds are infinitesimal that not one but two thousand-year-old Japanese fairytales would actually exist in real life, but even so you can’t quite bring yourself to disregard it. You Google ‘how to fold a paper crane’ more out of something to do in the twilight hours when it’s hardest to keep yourself awake than out of any true belief that you’ll be saved. Your first few cranes don't even slightly deserve that name, but you keep at it, ripping all the pages out of one of your old notebooks until your desk is covered in fragile, tilting paper birds. You rifle through your drawer until you uncover the red yarn that’s still crisscrossing your walls and use it and a pin to string ten cranes up at a time, the fragile white paper looking like it’s bleeding out on the harsh red string. You ignore it, keep folding.

 

_It rakes its claws down the inside of his skull—free from any constraints of humanity here where no one can see it—luxuriating in the pain it knows it causes him, however good he is at hiding it. He has wrenched control back from it for the moment, but his moment will pass. Hunger is its constant companion, and nothing will outlast it. He is a guttering flame, and it is the oncoming night, vast and savage. It clicks its tongue and gnashes its teeth, rooting around in his fears, his nightmares, anything to sustain it. It lets out a screeching hyena laugh, latching onto a fear—a memory!—of his father telling him that which he has always been most frightened to hear. “You know, he could be right,” it ponders, gleefully, “none of them would be in danger if not for you, boy. You’re going to kill all of them. They will die screaming, their blood on your hands.”_

 

You keep folding cranes, frantically, manically. Everywhere you go, you make sure you have piles of paper, backpack filling with little folded birds, your original strings of cranes multiplying furiously under the weight of your desperation. In a matter of days you’ve folded several hundred cranes; you could fold them in your sleep now—if you slept anymore, that is. Your fingers shake, and you nick yourself on the deceptively sharp edges of the paper more than a few times. It’s fitting, you think to yourself, idly, that you should bleed for this too, like everyone else is. You can’t trust your mind anymore, can’t believe your eyes and ears—so you concentrate on the feel of paper beneath your fingers, dry and rough and so, so much better than the slick warmth of your best friend’s blood. You shudder, hands clenching involuntarily, crushing the crane you were folding. Exhaling shakily through your nose, you flatten the paper, pressing your palms to the laminate of your desk as if in supplication. You keep folding, ignoring the wrinkles in the paper, ignoring the bloodstains and the rough-torn edges. They don’t have to be pretty—they just have to be _enough_.

 

_It is vexed. Its skin is cleverer than it might have imagined, and it is beginning to impede its carefully laid plans. His raggedy band of mutts is persistent and he himself is stubborn—giving no quarter without a fierce struggle. It is—vexing. It crouches, still as death, tension only visible in the agitated thrashing of its tails behind it. It had never faced a skin who fought as much as this one, who so fully refused to give in to its nightmares and its fear. It wonders if it was, perhaps, too hasty, too greedy, too prideful. It will not make the same mistake again. It settles in to wait._

 

You wake up in a panic, as you always do now. Your shaking hands splay out in the sheets around you, groping for something—anything—to tell you what you’ve woken up to this time. You remember expelling it, baiting it, _killing it_ , but what trust can you put in memories when your whole life has become an endless, walking, nightmare? You’re trembling so hard your knees won’t hold you; you crumple like so much wet paper to the floor, dig your nails into the thick pile of your carpet and crawl across your room on your knees. You make it to the far side of your desk where you’ve been piling your strings of cranes and start counting. When you make it to 990 your breath starts to come in pants and you squeeze your eyes shut, hunching over with the strength of your desire to not wake up screaming this time. You pull yourself back upright and count the last ten out loud, voice quavering like a child’s. _“Nine hundred ninety-one, nine hundred ninety-two, nine hundred ninety-three, nine hundred ninety-four, nine hundred ninety-five, nine hundred ninety-six, nine hundred ninety-seven, nine hundred ninety-eight, n-nine hundred ninety-nine…one thousand.”_ You exhale like you’ve been punched in the chest, the reality of making it to a thousand hitting you viscerally. You clasp your hands together and pray like you haven’t since your mother died.

 

_“Please, please, let me be awake this time.”_


End file.
